Gwich’in Olympic ski jumper Alexandria Loutitt has landed on the podium again, this time taking bronze at the World Cup in Ljubno, Slovenia, on Jan. 27.
This marks the ninth time she’s won a medal in 12 appearances. On this occasion, she finished with 258.9 points on the 90-metre hill with jumps of 89 and 88.5 metres.
“This is one of my favourite hills and has been since the first day I was here, but I wasn’t really happy with my jumps to be honest,” said Loutitt, 20. “I am happy though to know I can be on the podium even without good jumps.
“The takeoffs were good, but my flying wasn’t working, so my style was suffering and it just didn’t come together.”
Making a nod to her heritage, Loutitt wore her lucky rabbit fur moccasins for her jumps.
She and her teammates have moved from their Canadian base in Calgary to live full-time in Planica, Slovenia — described as a “ski jumping paradise.”
This not only allows her easy access to the hills she frequently has to compete on, being only two-hours away from Ljubno, it also provides her an audience of encouraging fans. As ski jumping is considerably more popular in Slovenia than in Canada, it draws much larger crowds — filling seats by the tens of thousands.
“It was so cool to have 10,000 people for the only women’s ski jumping event in Slovenia this year,” said Loutitt. “It was amazing. We definitely get extra support. I was jumping after Abi Strate (her teammate) and I could hear them cheering for her just as loud as the Slovenian girls so it was pretty cool.”
With her latest piece of hardware, Loutitt sits in fifth place in the overall individual standings. Team Canada is now ranked fourth overall in the Nations Cup standings.
Loutitt’s teammates are also doing quite well on the hill. In team jumping competition, 22-year-old Strate joined forces with Loutitt to combine scores for a silver medal finish in the Super Team ski jumping competition.
“Abi and I both believed we could do this,” said Loutitt. “I think people forget how young we are, but we are both Olympic medallists and I’m a world champion, so we both know how to handle the pressure of competing and putting out those consistent results.”
A third member of Team Canada, 24-year-old Nicole Maurer, finished 34th, just four spots behind the top-30 cut off to advance. Maurer not only flies with the top Canadian ski jumpers in the world, but also is double majoring in computer science and astrophysics and is aiming for the stars as an aspiring astronaut.